Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) will build an extended version of its Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) to carry the lunar rover and lander to the moon. Antrix Corp, the commercial arm of Isro signed the deal with Team Indus, an Antrix official confirmed the development. Team Indus declined comment.

TeamIndus has signed a contract with ISRO to launch its rover to Moon by the end of December, 2017.

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Bengaluru: To win the international Google Lunar XPrize, a private team must build a rover, launch it to the moon, ensure it travels for at least 500 metres on the lunar surface and sends back hi-def images and videos all by December 2017. And the only team from India and still in the race is cutting it real close. TeamIndus, based out of Bengaluru, India, hopes to make it in the last week of the last month of the contest onboard a PSLV rocket. The detail was finalised earlier this month, historic because it is ISRO’s first sale of its launch vehicle to a private entity.

As per the agreement with ISRO, India’s premier space agency will carry the TeamIndus Spacecraft in a launch window that begins on December 28, 2017. ISRO’s PSLV will inject the spacecraft into an elliptical orbit of 880 km x 70,000 km around the earth, before the spacecraft undertakes a 21-day journey to soft-land in Mare Imbrium, a region in the north-western hemisphere of the moon. After landing in Mare Imbrium, the spacecraft will deploy all its payload including the TeamIndus Rover that will traverse 500 metres on the moon’s surface to accomplish its Google Lunar XPRIZE objectives.

Right - in fact as described it will only launch before the end of the year. The landing will be in the middle of January. The X Prize Foundation will have to be a bit flexible on that point. If nobody else has succeeded, they may well allow it. Still, I hope to see other attempts in the months leading up to the deadline.

I would imagine it was Team Indus that asked for a date as late as possible, to give them time to have the spacecraft ready.

This way, they risk1. being beaten in the race by the other teams, who may be able to launch earlier.2. not able to accomplish the mission before the last date, due to any last minute launcher and/or s/c issues that may crop up.I would think that Team Indus would/should prefer to have at least a few weeks margin.

The XPRIZE verification of Team Hakuto’s launch agreement with India’s Team Indus boosts the number of approved competitors to five. That includes Team Indus as well as Moon Express, Synergy Moon and SpaceIL.

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The team’s arrangement calls for sharing a ride to the moon with Team Indus, a competitor, on a PSLV launch vehicle to be sent up from Satish Dhawan Space Center in India around Dec. 28, 2017. That’s just a few days before the deadline for winning a share of the $30 million Google Lunar XPRIZE purse.

I still wonder what it would mean for ISRO *if* TeamIndus were to perform the first Indian moon landing beating CY-2. I mean, we know CY-2 and TeamIndus spacecraft are attempts on vastly different scales, but the general public may not notice the difference.

It's all in how you play it. Indus could create excitement that Chandrayaan could build on, or it could deflate public interest in the second mission. It depends how ISRO promote their mission in social and mainstream media, and it could go either way. But my impression is that ISRO is not strong on public engagement and will probably not do as well as they could.

Chandrayaan 1 is a good example. The Moon Impact Probe took images down to the point of impact, but only a few frames were released and the potential for a dramatic animation was never realized. The mission team said the frames would not animate well because of the rapid rotation of the probe, but they didn't bother to consult outreach experts who could have pointed out other ways to do it (e.g. placing frames one at a time onto a map, following the ground track down to the point of impact). Similarly the main camera on the orbiter released a handful of press release images at the time, most of which are no longer available. No 'picture of the day' with meaningful outreach efforts.

So let's hope they can learn something from the previous case. In this respect Team Indus may be a great stimulus, if they offer really good public engagement a year before Chandrayaan 2. I hope so.

According to the latest reports, researchers in Kolkata have developed a payload that will share the ride with TeamIndus’s lunar rover and will land on the moon before the Republic Day of India.

“The four-kg payload would be installed atop a lunar lander that a Bengaluru-based private company Team Indus is planning to send to the moon in December 2017. We have signed a deal with Team Indus. The country’s trusted Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) engineered by India’s space agency ISRO would be carrying the lander and at least two rovers to the moon,” said Sandip Kumar Chakrabarti, Head of thade Indian Center for Space Physics in Kolkata.

The instrument will study outer space environment of the lunar surface. The spacecraft has sophisticated X-ray sensors and small but powerful computer to analyse the data.

As TeamIndus races to design an all-terrain rover by end-2017 for this lunar mission, the French Space Agency will provide it with cameras, the release said.

In the presence of the Minister, Narayan and Le Gall signed an agreement for equipping Axiom Research Lab’s lunar rover with two latest-generation CASPEX micro-cameras, developed by CNES in partnership with French firm 3DPlus.In joining forces with Team Indus on this first private mission to land a rover on the moon, CNES is sending French technology for the first time on lunar terrain, the release said.

As TeamIndus races to design an all-terrain rover by end-2017 for this lunar mission

If they're still designing their rover, that doesn't leave much time to build and test it before launch.

Of all the competitors, Team Indus will launch the Lunar Satellite and land on the moon as the last entry. Because their launch date is amongst the last one and do not forget that after launching the Team Indus Lunar Probe into earth orbit, PSLV has to raise the orbit of the lunar satellite after a series of engine burns to get into the Lunar orbit, just the way it launched Chandrayaan 1 to Lunar Orbit. So, if Team Indus wants to win the prize, they have to launch as early as the beginning of December, 2017.